Dr Karen McAulay explores the history of Scottish music collecting, publishing and national identity from the 18th to 20th centuries. Research Fellow at Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, author of two Routledge monographs.
Professor Porter has a new article in the Journal of Musicological Research, and I look forward to reading it at the earliest opportunity. Did you know an Englishwoman called Harriet Wainewright wrote an opera, Comala, in 1792?
Here are the article’s details, if you have access to this Taylor & Francis Journal:-
James PorterPublished online: 16 Feb 2021
I’ve recently been notified of a new website to explore: Musical Notables of New Zealand, authored by scholars Clare Gleeson and Libby Nichol. It provides background to people involved in music in New Zealand between 1840 and 1920 – as you can imagine, I very much look forward to exploring this blog further!
I’m speaking at the second Pondering Paratext seminar next Wednesday afternoon between 2.30 and 4 pm. There will also be a talk by Dr Hazel Wilkinson.
My talk is entitled ‘Scottish Songs and Dances ‘Preserved in their Native Simplicity’ and ‘Humbly Dedicated’: Paratext in Improbable Places’. Amongst other delights, I’ll be sharing some of my recent findings about subscription lists to Scottish fiddle tunebooks.
You can book to attend the seminar by clicking this Eventbrite link here – and find out more about the Eighteenth Century Paratext Research Network – by clicking this link.
(Musicologists of this kind of music – do take a closer look at the tune pictured above. The book it comes from is riddled with errors in the basslines – I know this for a fact. So, the first bar and the third bar here are actually very similar, and I’m tempted to play the first bar with the bassline that the third bar uses. I promise not to talk such heresy in my talk, of course, when I shall focus on the paratext rather than the notes themselves!)
I was one of the speakers doing a short talk for Glasgow University’s Hunterian museum on Tuesday 16 March evening – my talk was about Alexander Campbell, editor of Albyn’s Anthology (1816-18).
Tuesday 16 March 2021, 5.30pm – 7.00pm. Free – via Zoom https://www.gla.ac.uk/hunterian/visit/events/onlineevents/
Recordings of the talks will appear at the following link within the next couple of weeks:- https://www.gla.ac.uk/hunterian/visit/exhibitions/virtualexhibitions/oldwaysnewroads/
Apologies if it’s a bit quiet round here at the moment. I was all set to take a deep breath and [inhales] … start writing the first chapter for my next book, when I received the peer-reviewed chapter that I wrote for someone else’s book a couple of months ago.
Call them improvements, corrections or revisions, what you will, this means rather a lot of work before I can get back to my original plan.
And then there are the talks I’m giving in the next fortnight! It’s a busy time. Please bear with me. I’ll be back …
Two interesting seminars coming up! (I’m speaking at the second.) The schedule is as follows:
24 February, Wednesday 2.30-4pm (GMT)
Dr Dennis Duncan and Dr Kathleen Keown
17 March, Wednesday 2.30-4pm (GMT)
Dr Hazel Wilkinson and Dr Karen McAulay (The Gow fiddle collections are likely to feature in the latter talk!)
For full details, please click here.
Today, I was pleased to receive notification of the latest issue of Brio, the journal of my professional association. I’ve been a member of IAML(UK and Ireland) for – well, over 35 years now! The latest issue has my review of a book by a scholar whom I admire greatly – it was a privilege to review his book, and of course I am delighted to add the review copy to my own bookshelves as well! I’ve uploaded a copy of the review to our institutional repository – it’ll go live in the next few days – but for now, here’s the citation, and a direct link to my review:-
Brio vol.57 no.2, Autumn/Winter 2020, pp.74-76,
Review of:- James Porter, Beyond Fingal’s Cave: Ossian in the Musical Imagination (University of Rochester Press, 2019)
This has also been posted on Facebook, on my Glasgow Music Publishers page.
Well, that’s it done. I was invited to contribute a chapter to a book, and after quite a bit of research – and 34 hours’ writing in the past week – I have submitted it! Such a relief. I admit, I was a bit chastened to realise that I had just spent a whole week of Actual, Genuine Holiday sitting at my desk writing a book chapter – which constitutes actual, genuine intellectual work. Oh well, it had to be done!
This also means I can sidle out of the eighteenth century and back to the twentieth, to continue my researches into Scottish music publishers from the late Victorian era onwards.
Because of Covid, I still can’t do what I’d like to do next. I’d like to speak to very elderly people, to see what they can tell me about the Scottish music they and their parents enjoyed in the days before the folk revival. To do this properly, I’d have to get ethical clearance from my department, and then I’d need to reach out to the generation whose memories I’m particularly interested in. Obviously, Covid means I can’t go physically interviewing frail old people anywhere, so I’m a little bit stuck, and there’s no point in seeking ethical clearance to do anything of the sort, even when everyone’s had their vaccination.
But if you’ve got elderly relatives who enjoyed Scottish music in their youth, and they can remember particular books that they had in their music cabinets or piano stools, then do feel free to tell me what those books were! It might not be a formal, ethically-approved study, but even anecdotal stories help us document what was popular and, maybe, why it was. Maybe Great Auntie Doris always had a few songs that she sang at Hogmanay, or cousin Lottie used to sing from a certain book at Sunday School concerts? Or Bert next door was renowned for his bothy ballad renditions on the accordion? Do tell me! Otherwise, in another decade or two, we’ll have lost that generation and their stories with them.
I’ve done all the usual stuff – cooked and then enjoyed the dinner, snoozed in front of the TV, chatted with the family … and now I’m very tempted to open my research folders and continue pondering my latest conundrum, but I know that I shouldn’t! I shall wait at least until tomorrow before I continue to explore why this particular fiddler had fewer subscribers to his last collection (which ultimately turned out to have multiple flaws in the basslines, not that the subscribers would have known when they subscribed) …
Someone on Twitter asked, ‘What have you achieved this year that you’re proud of?’
DISCLAIMER (also posted on my Teaching Artist blog). It troubles me slightly that earlier in the pandemic, reading other people’s updates about all their achievements just made me feel guilty. All I was doing was working from home and keeping everyone safely looked after. Nothing heroic, nothing remarkable. I’ll be honest, my kneejerk reaction to such postings was a combination of, “come on, guys, do you have to?” and “well, I can’t be seen to be slacking here!” But the truth of the matter is that no-one fully knows other peoples’ situations – how much they’re struggling, whether they have caring responsibilities, or indeed, what their work-life balance is – whether they’ve chosen it or found it forced upon them.
I suppose the moral is that it’s pointless to try to compare oneself with other people. I’ve been in Glasgow nearly 33 years, still on the same grade, despite having gained a doctorate, a teaching certificate, and two fellowships. Written a book, published a lot, given plenty of research papers. Still – in terms of time allocation – more of a librarian than a postdoc researcher.
I was once told, “You’re a bloody librarian, woman!” In the west of Scotland, the “I kennt your faither” philosophy – not allowing someone to forget their place or where they came from – is still alive and well, and if I’m on the same grade, I’m forced to conclude that my value has not increased. It’s very depressing.
A former colleague once said that if one wasn’t moving jobs and climbing the ladder, then one was a failure. This philosophy favours men and people without children. I do admire people with ambition. I also admire and envy people who are less ambitious, but who are content with where they’re at. As for me, I’m still struggling with thwarted ambition, three and a half years before retirement! I should very much like to have moved jobs and climbed the ladder – anyone who thinks I’m unambitious, really doesn’t know me. However, I’ve raised three sons (who have benefited enormously from the Scottish education system, which is why we didn’t want to leave Scotland!) and I got those extra qualifications whilst working full-time. (Apart from statutory maternity leaves, I’ve always worked full-time.) If I’m a failure for not getting promoted – guilty as charged – then I do have a few good excuses. And I did recently get a Special Note of Commendation from my CILIP researcher colleagues, which was heartening.
During the Covid pandemic, I’ve pushed myself to achieve as much as I could, because I didn’t want to find myself sliding towards an unwanted, age-related slowing down. I am not yet of retirement age, and I can’t bear to think that inactivity might see me slipping out of the research scene before I’m ready. So this is posted in the spirit of demonstrating that I’m still here, still research-active, and not yet ready to be written off!
Not everything is a ‘research output’, obviously. I stitched my lockdown journal, for a start. (I even made a video about it.) I learned the concertina, and I wrote tunes for it.
I broke my foot, baked banana bread, put on weight, and once my foot was better, I put myself on a diet and exercise regime to lose some pounds. I’ve made gallons of soup, and done 95% of the housework. (Two of the three of us are over sixty – and two are oblivious to housework or the absence of our weekly cleaner!)
But in terms of research? Working from home since March, I’ve benefited from a mostly peaceful dining room (albeit a thoroughfare to the kitchen), and gained my commuting time along with the new responsibility of cooking most weekday meals. The allocation of my time to library (70%) and research (30%) is unchanged. I’ve done my user education and made several training videos in my library role, and I love this side of it. But I fight a compulsion to answer library emails at any time of the day or night (even the day after Boxing Day) for fear of being considered unhelpful if I don’t – whilst research would swallow me up whole, without any resistance from me, if I didn’t occasionally get dragged away from it! I freely admit that I have absolutely NOT limited my research activities to ten hours a week. It makes me excellent value, but I’m reaching the point where I feel I cannot try much harder, and it won’t really make any difference to my career trajectory. If one can have a flat trajectory in the first place!
Quite apart from wanting to achieve “outputs”, I have tried to take the attititude that it is easier to attend a Zoom conference than to arrange for everything to run smoothly in my absence attending a “real” live event in a diffferent city.
So, how have I done this very weird year? I am not dissatisfied.
PUBLICATIONS
PRESENTATIONS (whatever would we have done without Zoom and Teams?!)
I’ve also facilitated an event for the Friends of Wighton, made a mini video presentation about my research for a Scottish research event …
… and made the aforementioned video about my stitched lockdown journal. I’ve done quite a few training videos with my library hat on, too, but I’ll spare you the details of those!
Karen McAulay, Musicologist 